Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Me-Em Enewsbrief, December 2016, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering eNewsBrief

No abstract provided.

Fiber Glass Mat Splice Automation, Max Weinstein, Charles Scott Forbes, Max Kilpatrick

Mechanical Engineering

Currently, GAF has two operators manually splice together each roll of fiberglass mat. To save money and resources, GAF wants to automate this splicing process. Our team is responsible for stage 3 of 5 in this automation process. We are responsible for ensuring that the system is able to move autonomously to the necessary positions required for splicing together the rolls of fiberglass mat. We have determined the best solution for accomplishing this movement is to use linear slide actuators. This document will describe the process by which we arrived at our solution, the details of our solution, and a …

Compression Molded Composite Component, Greg Hermansen, Larsson Johnson, Joanne Medrano, Kyle Hammell

Mechanical Engineering

The following final design report outlines the design and fabrication of a carbon fiber compression molded sunglasses case. It intends to guide the development of a future lab activity for a composites undergraduate course at Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo. The activity aims to support an educational investigation in "out-of-autoclave" composites manufacturing methods, such as compression molding, which offer some key benefits over autoclave molding. The methodology behind the creation of a conceptual design, an initial prototype, and a final product is laid out in detail below.

Cal Poly Microgrid - Solar Panel Mounts, Dylan Mayer, Christian Odegard, Gregory Pellegrino, Connor Mckay

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Feasibility Of Friction Stir Processing (Fsp) As A Method Of Healing Cracks In Irradiated 304l Stainless Steels, Cameron Cornelius Gunter

Theses and Dissertations

The current US fleet of nuclear reactors has been in service for three decades. Over this period, existing welds in stainless steel (SS) shrouds have sustained stress corrosion cracking (SCC) and are in need of repair. Additionally, helium has formed interstitially as a byproduct of proton bombardment. Current repair technology, such as TIG welding, puts extreme amounts of heat into the material and allows for interstitial helium atoms to aggregate and form bubbles/voids at grain boundaries. This significantly weakens the material, proving to be a very counterproductive and ineffective repair technique. Much study has been done on friction stir processing …

Autonomous Goal-Based Mapping And Navigation Using A Ground Robot, Jeffrey L. Ferrin

Theses and Dissertations

Ground robotic vehicles are used in many different applications. Many of these uses include tele-operation of the robot. This allows the robot to be deployed in locations that are too difficult or are unsafe for human access. The ability of a ground robot to autonomously navigate to a desired location without a-priori map information and without using GPS would allow robotic vehicles to be used in many of these situations and would free the operator to focus on other more important tasks. The purpose of this research is to develop algorithms that enable a ground robot to autonomously navigate to …

Evolvability And Excess Capability As A Response To Uncertain And Future Requirements, Jeffrey Douglas Allen

Theses and Dissertations

Product and system designers face many challenges in the modern world. Designing products that will be subject to emerging or uncertain requirements can be one of the most significant of these challenges. A major risk associated with emerging or uncertain requirements is premature obsolescence. Large-scale, complex engineered systems, such as, aircraft, spacecraft, large seagoing vessels, communication and power systems are especially susceptible to this issue. However, this challenge is not limited to only large-scale complex systems. Even relatively simple products can suffer from premature obsolescence and even failure to be initially accepted, due to inadequately understood or changing requirements. One …

Extending Time Until Failure During Leaking In Inflatable, Pneumatically Actuated Soft Robots, Joshua Parker Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

Soft robots and particularly inflatable robots are of interest because they are lightweight, compact, robust to impact, and can interact with humans and their environment relatively safely compared to rigid and heavy traditional robots. Improved safety is due to their low mass that results in low-energy collisions and their compliant, soft construction. Inflatable robots (which are a type of soft robot) are also robust to impact and have a high torque to weight ratio. As a result inflatable robots may be used for many applications such as space exploration, search and rescue, and human-robot interaction. One of the potential problems …

The Feasibility Of Using A Markerless Motion Capture Sensor (Leap MotionTm Controller) Forquantitative Motor Assessment Intended For A Clinical Setting, Clay Jordan Kincaid

Theses and Dissertations

Although upper limb motor impairments are common, the primary tools for assessing and tracking these impairments in a clinical setting are subjective, qualitative rating scales that lack resolution and repeatability. Markerless motion capture technology has the potential to greatly improve clinical assessment by providing quick, low-cost, and accurate tools to objectively quantify motor deficits. Here we lay some of the groundwork necessary to enable markerless motion capture systems to be used in clinical settings. First, we adapted five motor tests common in clinical assessments so they can be administered via markerless motion capture. We implemented these modified tests using a …

Pendulum Based Impact Testing Of Athletic Helmets Using The Nocsae Headform, Bradley Thorne

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Concussions in organized sports can have detrimental short-term and long-term effects on player’s health. The focus of this research is the development of a new state of the art test and certification standard for protective headgear. Baseball helmets and soccer soft headgear were used in these tests, but the ultimate goal is to create a universal set of test guidelines for all types of protective headgear. Modifications to current test standards outlined by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) employed the use of a pendulum impactor, which facilitated additional measurements during head impact tests using a …

Multi-Axial Fiber Optic Reference Strain Sensor For Flexible Dynamics Of Structures, Gabriel Lapilli

Theses and Dissertations

Launch vehicles are in an ever-decreasing weight trend, with bodies becoming more slender to reduce aerodynamic loading. Mass and stiffness tend to be opposing concepts when designing launch vehicles: a stiffer structure means it is usually heavier. Lower stiffness on launch vehicles may produce excessive vibrations during flight, reducing the performance, operating characteristics and safety margins of the vehicle. It also impacts flight dynamics: as the vehicle flies, the orientation of its thrusters and actuators are impacted by the vibrations, creating potential instabilities in the control schemes. This is currently accounted for by using single-point inertial measurements and feeding the …

Real Time Implementation Of An Inertial Measurement Unit Based On Fiber-Bragg Sensor Array Using Legendre Polynomial, Taher Saifee Parekh

Theses and Dissertations

Missiles and launch vehicle are trending towards becoming more slender in shape to reduce aerodynamic drag. Bending vibrations of the rocket body occur when a flying object with a large slenderness performs pitch or yaw command. The onboard Inertia Measurement Unit (IMU) measures the attitude and the angular velocities of the deflected body as well as the rigid body motion and in turn feeds these signals back to the control loop. Feedback of the vibrating information degrades the control system stability and in the worst case makes the system unstable. These effects become more significant when the slenderness ratio of …

An Improved Fuel Spray Breakup Model For Advanced Internal Combustion Engine Configurations, Chitra Sadanandan

Theses and Dissertations

Lack of oil resources and increasing effects of global warming have emphasized and led to stricter regulation standards. To meet the current demands, the engines need to be highly efficient in terms of fuel efficiency and performance. One of the fundamental ways to achieve this goal is by studying the fuel atomization and the combustion process. However, there are several challenges involved in studying the process of atomization and combustion only through experimental approaches as they involve numerous parameters. A suitable supplement or alternative to the experimental approach is the numerical approach. Advances in high performance computing, have led to …

Forcespinning®: An Alternative Method To Fabricate Metal Oxide/Carbon Composite Nanofiber Anodes For Li-Ion Batteries, Luis Zuniga

Theses and Dissertations

Metals and their respective oxides have been highly regarded as next generation anode materials for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). In this research work the electrochemical performance of Sn, SnO2, and TiO2. With the advantages of nanotechnology and the Forcespinning® method of fabricating micro and nanofibers, binder-free anodes are produced from metal or metal oxide/carbon composite microfibers. Through these microfibers the electrochemical performance of the above mentioned materials are significantly improved due to the increased surface area per volume providing a large number of reaction sites for the anode materials. Further performance enhancement was achieved by also modifying the fiber microstructure to …

Wettability Of Nonwoven Polymeric Nanofiber Mats, Edgar Munoz

Theses and Dissertations

The wettability of heterogeneous materials has been attracting special interest by academia and industrial sector given the need to development self-cleaning Nonwoven nanofiber mats have demonstrated potential given its hydrophobicity granted by the ultimate structure of the system, small fiber diameter and small pores giving rise to effects such as the Cassie-Baxter. This thesis analyzed the wettability of a wide range of polymeric systems. Nanofiber mats were manufactured using the Forcespinning® technology. Samples were prepared at different polymeric concentrations and rotational speeds to alter fiber size; density of the mat was also altered to evaluate the effect of porosity on …

Optimizing Border Security With Stochastic And Deterministic Strategies, Gabriel A. Rueda

Theses and Dissertations

International trade and border security have always been linked together, and so has the need to find ways to improve security decisions. The United States and bordering countries benefit from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but amongst the positive effects of NAFTA there is a looming drug threat that effects the bi-national supply chains. In 2015 Customs and Border Protections (CBP) processed over 72,000 trucks, rail, and sea containers a day. CBP also seized 3.4 million pounds of narcotics, the majority of them at the ports of entry. With unknown threats using commercial vehicles to transport their illicit …

Knee Joint Internal Forces During Squat Jump Exercise, Ricardo Moreno

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to investigate muscular ligament and joint contact forces produced during squat jump exercise. An inverse dynamics, two dimensional, leg model is used to describe the motion in the sagittal plane. The lower extremity model includes two bones, tibia and femur, tibio-femoral ligaments, and muscles such as quadriceps, hamstrings, and gastrocnemius. The ligaments are anatomically modeled as nonlinear strings, but the femoral condyle is modeled as a circle and the tibial plateau as a straight line. Experimental squat jump exercises are conducted to obtain the ground reaction forces, the angular accelerations, and centroid linear acceleration …

Study Of Selective Laser Remelting Of 316l S.S. To Reduce Roughness On Inclined Surface, Jafar Ghorbani

Theses and Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies are increasingly competing with subtractive methods, and there are promising applications for additive technologies that are hybrid with traditional manufacturing methods. Poor surface roughness of additive manufactured parts continues to be a major challenge especially for advanced functional parts. In this study, effect of processing parameters are evaluated, optimized and verified by using the Box–Behnken design of experiment method. The results, for the first time, reveal that surface remelting has the potential to become a high speed approach for improving the roughness of non-horizontal surface of additive manufactured parts.

Development Of A Fundamental Autonomous Ground Vehicle Cruise Control Using Matlab And Simulink, Luis F. Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

This study presents and describes the development of a fully autonomous vehicle cruise control system covering the vehicle dynamics and control design needed to simulate such system. It encompasses obstacle avoidance, intelligent-and-optimal lane change as well as adaptive behavior. This study offers a comprehensive two-dimensional cruise control with three degrees of freedom and it is designed using active obstacle avoidance controllers. It also includes optimized fuzzy logic for optimal vehicle trajectory and an extensive array of control law methodology. The end work shows a complete simulation run using MATLAB and Simulink.

Self-Patterning Gd Nano-Fibers In Mg-Gd Alloys, Yangxin Li, Jian Wang, Kaiguo Chen, Meiyue Shao, Yao Shen, Li Jin, Guo-Zhen Zhu

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Faculty Publications

Manipulating the shape and distribution of strengthening units, e.g. particles, fibers, and precipitates, in a bulk metal, has been a widely applied strategy of tailoring their mechanical properties. Here, we report self-assembled patterns of Gd nano-fibers in Mg-Gd alloys for the purpose of improving their strength and deformability. 1-nm Gd nano-fibers, with a 〈c〉-rod shape, are formed and hexagonally patterned in association with Gd segregations along dislocations that nucleated during hot extrusion. Such Gd-fiber patterns are able to regulate the relative activities of slips and twinning, as a result, overcome the inherent limitations in strength and ductility of Mg alloys. …

A Genetic Algorithm Incorporating Design Choice For The Preliminary Design Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Kenneth Michael Mull

Masters Theses

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently at the forefront of aerospace technologies. The design of these aircraft is complex and often performance characteristics are coupled to multiple design attributes. At the early design phase both discrete and continuous design choices are present limiting the feasibility of traditional derivative based optimization techniques. In place of these methods, the design space can be explored using a genetic algorithm that mimics the process of natural selection, providing a capable and reliable base airframe constructed from the required performance metrics. By incorporating a genetic multidisciplinary optimization algorithm early in the conceptual design phase, aircraft …

Optimal Design Of Automotive Exhaust Thermoelectric Generator (Aeteg), Hassan Fagehi

Masters Theses

A consumption of energy continues to increase at an exponential rate, especially in terms of automotive spark ignitions vehicles. About 40% of the applied fuel into a vehicle is lost as waste exhaust to the environment. The desire for improved fuel efficiency by recovering the exhaust waste heat in automobiles has become an important subject. The thermoelectric generator (TEG) has the potential to convert exhaust waste heat into electricity as long as it is improving fuel economy. The remarkable amount of research being conducted on TEGs indicates that this technology will have a bright future in terms of power generation. …

Analytical Study Of Miniature Thermoelectric Device, Mohammed Dhannoon

Masters Theses

Miniature thermoelectric devices (TE) have been regarded as hopeful devices to attain efficient cooling in microprocessors and other small-scale devices. To recognize the performances of miniature thermoelectric coolers, a thermoelectric cooling module is theoretically analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the impact of the thermoelectric element length effect and the substrate material type influence on the cooling performance. The electrical contact resistance and thermal contact are taken into account.

Furthermore, miniature thermoelectric is compared with large thermoelectric, and effective material properties of miniature thermoelectric are studied. The obtained results also demonstrate power density (cooling/heating power per unit area of the …

Optimization Methodology For Cvt Ratio Scheduling With Consideration Of Both Engine And Cvt Efficiency, Steven Beuerle

Masters Theses

A transmission ratio schedule is developed to optimize the fuel consumption for an automotive continuously variable transmission (CVT) connected to an internal combustion engine (ICE). Although the optimal operating line (OOL) generated from an engine brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) map can be used to generate a CVT ratio schedule that yields maximum engine efficiency, it was found that OOL-based CVT ratio scheduling does not necessarily offer the best fuel economy because optimal CVT efficiency does not always correspond to OOL tracking. To develop a CVT ratio schedule that can offer the best fuel economy, a novel ratio-scheduling methodology is …

Direct Quadrature Method Of Moments With Delumping For Modeling Multicomponent Droplet Vaporization, Simcha L. Singer

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A multicomponent droplet vaporization model which combines the computational efficiency of continuous thermodynamic approaches with the detailed species information provided by discrete component models has been developed. The Direct Quadrature Method of Moments (DQMoM) is used to efficiently solve for the evolution of the nodes and weights of the equivalent liquid-phase mole fraction distribution without assuming any functional form. The novelty of the approach is an inexpensive delumping procedure that is used to reconstruct the time-dependent mole fractions and fluxes for all discrete species. When applied to a vaporizing kerosene droplet, agreement between the full discrete component model, which solves …

Traction And Launch Control For A Rear-Wheel-Drive Parallel-Series Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle, Adam Michael Szechy

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Hybrid vehicles are becoming the future of automobiles leading into the all-electric generation of vehicles. Electric vehicles come with a great increase in torque at lower RPM resulting in the issue of transferring this torque to the ground effectively. In this thesis, a method is presented for limiting wheel slip and targeting the ideal slip ratio for dry asphalt and low friction surfaces at every given time step. A launch control system is developed to further reduce wheel slip on initial acceleration from standstill furthering acceleration rates to sixty miles per hour. A MATLAB Simulink model was built of the …

Investigating The Highest Melting Temperature Materials: A Laser Melting Study Of The Tac-Hfc System, Omar Cedillos-Barraza, Dario Manara, K. Boboridis, Tyson Watkins, Salvatore Grasso, Daniel D. Jayaseelan, Rudy J. M. Konings, Michael J. Reece, William E. Lee

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Student Publications and Presentations

TaC, HfC and their solid solutions are promising candidate materials for thermal protection structures in hypersonic vehicles because of their very high melting temperatures (>4000 K) among other properties.  The melting temperatures of slightly hypostoichiometric TaC, HfC and three solid solution compositions (Ta1−xHfxC, with x = 0.8, 0.5 and 0.2) have long been identified as the highest known. In the current  research, they were reassessed, for the first time in the last fifty years, using a laser heating technique.  They were found to melt in the range of 4041–4232 K, with HfC having the highest and TaC the lowest. …

Design Of A Rotating Brush Underwater Grooming Device With A Focus On Brush Optimization, Motor Control And Design For Reliability, Mark Harrison Nanney

Theses and Dissertations

The design and control of Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) to groom or clean the underwater surface of ship hulls is becoming an important aspect of the maintenance of vessels to the United States Navy. The biological growth below the waterline of the vessels can be the cause for drag penalties near 21% causing up to 32% increase in shaft power at 15 knots (Schultz, 2007). Research conducted by the Center for Corrosion and Biofouling Control at Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) indicated that weekly grooming can prevent high profile biological growth (Hearin, et al., 2015). The design of a rotating …

A Study To Develop An Electronics Chassis Compound Cylinder Pressure Vessel Using Finite Element Modeling, Gordon Randall Straley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops a process to design and analyze a two-layer compound cylinder pressure vessel utilizing an inner insert to house electronic circuit card assemblies. The process begins with sizing and analysis of a compound cylinder based on analytical formulas and progresses in complexity to a 2-Dimensional plane stress finite element model of the chassis assembly and ends with a computationally expensive 3-Dimensional finite element analysis of the pressure vessel. Comparing the results from the compound cylinder to the electronics chassis, it is observed that the inner insert geometry has a strong influence on the interfacial pressure at the upper …

The Design Of An Articulating Five-Headed In-Water Grooming Tool To Maintain Ships Free Of Fouling, Caglar Erdogan

Theses and Dissertations

Biofouling is a major concern to ship owners. Biofouling increases hull roughness, increasing the frictional resistance and fuel consumption while decreasing maximum speed. Finding a way to maintain hulls free from fouling has, therefore, become a research challenge for scientists and engineers. Grooming has been proposed as a novel method for controlling fouling (Tribou and Swain 2010). It refers to the regular proactive light cleaning to maintain the hull free of fouling with minimal impact to ship coatings. The purpose of this thesis is to design, build, and deploy a compliant multiheaded grooming tool which utilized five polypropylene vertically rotating …